Email is one of the most common forms of communication in today's digital age. Email systems employ various ways to facilitate conversations, and current email systems allow users to quickly respond to messages with a click of a button or a touch on a screen. However, emails, as well as other communication formats, can be sent to either a single recipient or multiple recipients, and the conventional methods used in current email systems can often cause confusions in communications.
When an email is sent to multiple recipients, for example, user A sends an email to user B and user C, in replying to the email, user B may either reply to user A only, or to both user A and user C.
In conventional email systems, a common practice is to provide two separate user interface objects such as two buttons or dropdown menu items, one for replying to the sender only, and the other for replying to all recipients. Such objects are often labeled as “Reply” or “Reply to All”. In some systems, only one button is displayed as the default, especially when it is implemented on a mobile device due to limited viewing area, and the default option is often for replying to the sender only.
However, a problem with the conventional approach is that users may not always be aware that the original message is sent to multiple recipients. In such a case, if the user acts on the Reply button either by habit, as most of the emails the user receives are addressed to a single person, or by convenience when only the Reply button is visible, other recipients in the thread may miss an important message from the user. On the other hand, even when both the Reply button and “Reply to All” button are visible or are equally convenient to act on, sometimes the user's reply may contain sensitive or private information intended for only the sender of the original message. In such a case, acting on the “Reply to All” button can have undesired consequences.
Furthermore, there are times when a user needs to forward an email to another person who is not a recipient of the original email. In cases where the email being forwarded is a thread containing previous emails from multiple persons, certain information in the thread, such as other person's name or email addresses, or certain content in the previous emails, may be confidential or private to the original persons in the thread only, or not intended for the person that the email thread is being forwarded to.
More effective solutions to problems like the above are needed.